Cheon Seong Gyeong: Episode 25

Cheon Seong Gyeong Book 1: God
Chapter 4: The God Who Needs Liberation
Section 1: God's Sorrow and the Providence of Restoration, 79
Section 2: The God of Re-Creation, 1-13

 

(79) God, by all means, has to restore the ideal of true love and peace that He has held onto since the beginning.  God's providence of salvation is the providence to restore that original state; in other words, it is the providence of restoration.  For the providence of restoration, God set up religions and expanded the realm of goodness.  The Messiah whom God sends is responsible to complete the providence of restoration.  Therefore the Messiah must come as the True Parents and quickly recover everything, starting from the root.  Jesus, who came as the Messiah, had the mission of the True Parents.  He came with true love to give rebirth to all humankind and to restore them as true individuals and as true husbands and wives, so that they too could become true parents.  Unfortunately he could not complete this mission due to the disbelief of those on earth, and he departed with the promise to return.  He must come again as True Parents in order to restore completely God's ideal of creation.

Section 2: The God of Re-Creation

(1) Due to the Fall, God lost everything that He had created in six days, from the first to the sixth day.  Because of human beings, He lost everything.  To restore this, God has led providential history for six thousand years.  Now this history is moving on to the seventh millennium.  Christianity speaks of a kingdom that will last a thousand years, but that thousand years could be understood as one day.  The thousand-year kingdom actually refers to the realm of resurrection on the world level.

God's course in the providential history of restoration

(2) You have to build a foundation in your daily life that connects your life in this world to your eternal life.  Otherwise that connection will not be made.  Adam and Eve should have fulfilled the full potential for their lives on a universal level, but they fell, and God has been toiling for six thousand years to restore this.  That is why the history of the providence of restoration is called the history of God's toil.

(3) If human beings had reached perfection centered on God, their joy would have been God's joy and their glory would have been God's glory.  But because they were unable to attain that state, instead of featuring joy and glory as God had hoped, they ended up living in sorrow.  Having sinned, they fell far from the garden of the ideal.  Ever since then, God has endeavored to restore fallen human beings.  This has been the history of the providence of restoration.

(4) To this day, no one knew that human history was the history of the providence of restoration.  Explaining the course of history by the concept of restoration is the Unification Church's great contribution to the study of history.  God is the root of history; thus He took responsibility for it, led it and developed it.  Along the way there were numerous individuals, families, tribes, peoples and nations who were responsible for the mission of restoration, and whose efforts made it possible for history to advance step by step.

(5) Looking at things from God's viewpoint, from the beginning of history to the present time God has not yet seen the day of total victory, the day when He could celebrate.  Instead, God has been toiling for thousands of years to achieve His ideal of creation, from the day Adam and Eve fell, through the history of the providence of restoration.  Still He has not yet reached the stage at which He can claim victory and glory.  We have not yet reached that stage; we are still on the way.  What God ultimately desires is true victory, when the truth has absolute authority and exercises its power.  This power is not to be exercised only once, but should operate continuously throughout history—past, present and future.  On the basis of God’s victory, the truth should pervade everything.  Nevertheless, God has not yet welcomed such a day.  At certain points in the course of the providence of restoration, God attained a partial victory, only to have the next stage in the historical process end in failure.

(6) The history of the providence of restoration since Adam and Eve has been carried out through vertical relationships.  People need to pray, "God! God! Please help us reach the standard of perfection." They have to climb up through the positions of servant of servants, servant, adopted child, direct child and parent.  They have to go back to the Old Testament Age before Jacob and become servants of servants.  Then they must climb up through the positions to become adopted children, and to become direct children.  Only in this way can they finally meet the True Parents, the Messiah who with his bride stands in the position of the Parents of humankind.  In this way the era when human beings were servants of servants, the era when they were servants, and the eras when they became adopted children, direct children and parents, can all be liberated.

(7) We are the people who must recover the kingdom of heaven, the garden of victory that people throughout history have been seeking with hope and faith.  To do so, we ourselves must become individuals that God can be happy with and form families that God can be happy with.  However, in order to form such families, we must restore ourselves as true brothers and sisters, true couples, and true parents.  It is to restore all of these that God has been conducting His providence in history.  The Old Testament Age was the age that symbolized hope, and the New Testament Age was the age that symbolized faith.  But in the future, the age that symbolizes love will come.  We call it the Completed Testament Age.  This destiny is now unfolding, from the heavenly world to the earthly world.

(8) The ideal world of creation was to be built based on the one Will, but due to the Fall, it was not fulfilled.  Nevertheless, God has absolute authority.  Even though the entire external world may change, God will never change.  Even though He lost Adam and Eve and all things to the devil, Satan, since God is still God, the Absolute Being, He must bring Satan, who was originally an archangel, to voluntarily surrender.  He has to establish His authority as the absolute God, but in a natural way that does not insist upon His authority.  God is good.  Therefore, He cannot strike the evil Satan first.  In the realm of God, who is good and whose essence is love, there can be no cause or motive for striking first.  God must live even for that enemy.  God invests and invests Himself for all created things and lives for their sake.  This is the dignity and absolute authority of God.  Hence, even though the devil came into existence and no matter how much he opposes God, he can never cause God to compromise His dignity and authority.  Since God continues living for others even in that position, His providence of salvation inevitably has taken thousands of years.  Yet through this course, He is bringing the devil ever closer to natural submission.

(9) Human history is the struggle between good and evil. God originally intended to govern true parents, true children, true families, true nations, a true world and a true universe according to the ideal of true love. However, Satan has been governing false parents, false children, false families, false nations, a false world and a false universe through false love. To restore this, human history has entailed repeated struggles between good and evil. That is to say, from individuals up to the global level, Satan has mimicked God's way of developing history through the Principle, imitating the principled world before the true one could emerge.  He seized the initiative, with the pretense that his was the true world, and tried to destroy the world of the Principle.  Hence, struggles between good and evil were inevitable.  In leading the providence of re-creation, God takes an altruistic stance.  He acts for the sake of others again and again and follows the strategy of being struck first and then taking back what is His.  On the other hand, Satan takes a self-centered stance and strikes first; but later he must pay compensation for the damage.  God's strategy is to be struck first and later to claim damages; Satan always strikes first but comes to ruin later.  In this way, the good side advances by being struck first, receiving persecution and making sacrifices, while Satan's side does the opposite.

The meaning of the Old Testament Age, New Testament Age and Completed Testament Age

(10) When we look at the overall course of restoration in history, we see that God leads the providence through the three stages of formation, growth and completion.  The course of the providence advances from the Old Testament Age, the era of servants, to the New Testament Age, the era of adopted children, to the Completed Testament Age, the era of true children, and finally to the era of True Parents.

(11) Human history can be categorized into three ages: the Old Testament Age, the New Testament Age and the Completed Testament Age. The Old Testament Age was the age when children were redeemed by sacrificial offerings. It was a time to make preparations for the coming of God's Son. In the New Testament Age, Jesus became the offering. Based on this, we received the Parents. During that time, God made preparations for the coming of the bride and bridegroom, so that we could receive the Parents at the time of the Second Coming. The reason why I, bearing the name True Parent, have suffered for forty years as the central person of the Completed Testament Age is to welcome God on earth and achieve oneness between God and human beings.

(12) How is it that God has continued in bitter sorrow through the six thousand years of history? He had to lead human beings, who were positioned between God and Satan, to make certain conditions. These conditions are the mountains of offering sacrifices. Looking back at the six thousand years of providential history, in the Old Testament Age God led human beings to climb the mountain of offering by sacrificing the things of creation; and in the New Testament Age, they climbed the mountain through the offering of Jesus Christ, who gave his actual body.  What, then, are you to offer as a sacrifice in the Completed Testament Age? You faithful believers have to climb the mountain by offering yourselves as sacrifices. Thus it is that providential history that has advanced overall based on the offering of sacrifices.  In the Old Testament Age people climbed the mountain by offering the things of creation.  In the New Testament Age, the offering of Jesus Christ, the Son of God surmounted the mountain of sacrifice.  Now, in the Completed Testament Age, you, representing the bridegroom and the bride, have to climb over the mountain of sacrifice by offering yourselves. You will not see the world of true peace, freedom and the ideal until you have climbed over the mountain of sacrifice.

(13) In the Old Testament Age, the things of creation were sacrificed as offerings to God; in the New Testament Age the offering was made by the sacrifice of His Son; and in the Completed Testament Age it is the Parents who sacrifice themselves.  God's purpose in having human beings sacrifice material things and in denying their right of ownership was to restore them as His sons and daughters. His purpose in sacrificing His Son, Jesus, was to recover the Parents, and the purpose of the Parents carrying the cross is to attend God.  Therefore the Old Testament Age is the age of righteousness by works, the New Testament Age is the age of righteousness by faith, and the Completed Testament Age is the age of righteousness by attendance.